This week, Representative Paul Ryan may have made himself a leading Republican presidential contender in 2016. By proposing an end to the budget impasse that did not include one word—Obamacare—the Wisconsin Republican may have outmaneuvered Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Multiple proposals are under consideration in Washington. If Ryan’s plan becomes the basis for a bipartisan budget agreement, it will boost his standing and be a body blow to the Tea Party.

Ryan is clearly trying to position himself as a fiscal conservative who is serious about addressing the country’s deficit problem—without destroying the U.S. economy in the process. He is trying to win the support of the moderate Republicans and mainstream business leaders increasingly exasperated by the Tea Party’s flirtation with default.

Along with not insisting that Obamacare be part of any deal, Ryan dropped his controversial proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher program.

“Right now, we need to find common ground,” Ryan wrote in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed article that outlined his proposed deal. “We need to open the federal government.”

Ryan’s proposal has its problems. It only addresses the debt ceiling and includes conditions that President Obama should reject. But it is an opportunity for negotiations and a potential path out of increasingly dangerous deadlock.

Obama should only sign a measure that reopens the government and raises the debt ceiling without conditions. But he should embrace a short-term deal that includes immediate fiscal talks with Republicans. Yes, kicking the can down the road for a month or two is not ideal—but it is far better than default.

Democrats are understandably wary of Ryan. He could be a far-right Trojan Horse. Faced with a default catastrophe, entitlement reforms that Republicans have been unable to enact for years look less painful. So do tax reforms that may benefit the wealthy. By positioning itself even farther to the right, skeptics argue, the Republican Party could get the fiscal reforms it wants.

But Democrats should realize that the current impasse is strengthening their hand. Four polls released this week show that the shutdown is doing far more damage to Republicans than Democrats. In short, the Tea Party is losing.

On Monday, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of how Republicans are handling themselves in the budget impasse, a 7 percent increase since last week. In a bad sign for Cruz and Paul, 59 percent of Americans who identified themselves as conservatives said they disapproved of how the GOP has handled the issue as well.

Democrats are also suffering damage. Sixty percent of those polled said they disapproved of how Democrats were handling the dispute. And 51 percent said they disapproved of Obama’s performance. A Pew Research Center poll also released on Monday showed similar findings. Thirty-eight percent of Americans blamed Republicans for the shutdown while 30 percent blamed Obama.

On Thursday, a Gallup poll found a 10 percent drop in GOP approval rating—from 38 percent last month to 28 percent now. That was the lowest approval rating for the party since Gallup began asking the question in 1992.

And an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll also released on Thursday found that 53 percent of respondents blamed the Republican Party more for the shutdown and only 31 percent blamed Obama—a wider margin of blame for the GOP than during the 1995-1996 shutdown.

Whether or not Ryan is being politically opportunistic, he is showing more courage than House Speaker John Boehner, whose primary concern appears to be appeasing the House’s Tea Party Caucus so he can remain speaker.

Ryan is playing to his base: fiscal conservatives. In his opinion piece, Ryan proposed mean-testing Medicare premiums so that the wealthy pay more, reforming the Medigap program and forcing federal employees to contribute more to their own retirement.

Ryan claimed that the savings from those three measures would be large enough to ease the across-the-board cuts—known as the sequester. Unlike some Tea Party members, he agrees that the sequester is a foolish way to cut spending.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told the New York Times on Thursday that she and her fellow Democrats have changed their view of Ryan after meeting with him dozens of times this year to try to find a compromise.

Murray and Ryan both said that they believed they could find common ground between the vastly different budgets enacted this year by the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House.

“Patty and I have a good relationship,” Ryan told the Times. “We don’t agree on much but we get along well.”

Ryan has disappointed before. He declined to be part of the “super committee” that was set up to avoid a default in 2011. At the time, his aspirations for higher office were seen as prompting him to be cautious.

Maybe, just maybe, the 2012 defeat tempered Ryan. One way to tell will be whether he continues to embrace conservative opposition to tax increases of any kind as part of a fiscal “grand bargain.”

A short-term delay will not solve our enormous political and fiscal problems. But it will show whether the Tea Party has peaked in influence. And whether Ryan has changed.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.